The emerging literature on electoral compliance and election fraud has generated important insights, but it tended to use “elections” or the aggregate “opposition parties” as the unit of analysis rather than individual political parties. However, not all opposition parties follow the same post-electoral strategy, yet little attention has been paid to this variation. I contend that parties’ post-electoral decisions are shaped not only by the election factors but also by their individual characteristics. In addition, different political parties may be affected differently by electoral manipulation, which in turn affects their post-election responses. I test the argument with an original dataset of over 300 political parties in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union (1990-2009) using hierarchical linear modelling that captures the impact of both election and party-level characteristics on political parties’ decisions to reject electoral results. This study shows that approaching the phenomenon of post-election disputes from both the election- and the party-level offers a more accurate perspective of, and new insights into, the questions of post-electoral compliance.
